Fred C. Ikle

Fred Charles Ikle is a Distinguished Scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ikle's expertise is in defense and foreign policy; nuclear strategy; Korea; and the emerging international order. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and his name has been linked with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Ikle was one of the signatories of the Project for the New American Century documents Statement of Principles (June 3, 1997). 

Ikle served as a Commissioner on the National Commission on Terrorism, which produced the Report of the National Commission on Terrorism in June 2000 for President William Jefferson Clinton.

Prior to joining CSIS in 1988, Fred Iklé was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the Ronald Reagan administration and Director for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1973-1977). He also cochaired the bipartisan Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, which published Discriminate Deterrence in January 1988. In 1975 and 1987, Iklé received the highest civilian award of the Department of Defense, the Distinguished Public Service Medal; in 1988, he was awarded the Bronze Palm.

Ikle has served as Chairman of the Board of the Telos Corporation and as a Director of the Zurich-American Insurance Companies and of CMC Energy Services. He serves as governor of the Smith Richardson Foundation and as chairman of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on defense, foreign policy, and arms control, including Every War Must End (Columbia University Press, 1971 and 1991) and How Nations Negotiate (Harper & Row, 1968). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and speaks French and German.

"Ikle, along with the Department of Defense Office of Net Assessment's (ONA) aging Andrew Marshall, spans almost six decades of architecting U.S. strategic doctrine. Both he and Marshall first worked together at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. Marshall is known as the inventor of the utopian 'revolution in military affairs' approach of subordinating all military considerations to U.S. digital 'supremacy' in the otherwise now fast disappearing, 'third wave' NASDAQ new economy. Ikle has been the senior proponent of 'homeland defense'." 

"He is also a Director of the National Endowment for Democracy and the Defense Forum Foundation, and serves on the advisory boards of RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center, the Center for Security Policy, and the American Foreign Policy Council. Between 1977 and 1981, Dr. Iklé served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee’s Advisory Council on International Security (1977 to 1979), and as Coordinator of Governor Reagan’s Foreign Policy Advisors (1979 to 1980). Dr. Iklé is the author of several books, including How Nations Negotiate and Every War Must End. From 1968 to 1972, Dr. Iklé was head of the Social Science Department of the RAND Corporation. From 1964 to 1967, he was Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." 


 * Recipient of the 2001 NED Democracy Service Medal
 * Advisory Board, Federation for American Immigration Reform

Related Sourcewatch

 * Project for the New American Century, PNAC, original signer